HT19 Public Lecture: Professor Seumas Miller

12 March 17:30 to 13 March 18:45

Oxford Martin School

Professor Seumas Miller is a senior research fellow in the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He also has research appointments at TU Delft (The Hague) and Charles Sturt University (Canberra) - in the Cooperative Research Centre in Cybersecurity. In 1994 he was appointed Foundation Professor of Philosophy at Charles Sturt University and in 2000 Foundation Director of the Australian Research Council's Special Research Centre in Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. He was a professor in philosophy at the Australian National University from 2003-2011. He is currently the principal investigator on a European Research Council Advanced Grant on global terrorism and collective responsibility. He is the author or coauthor of over 200 academic articles and of 20 books, including Moral Foundations of Social Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Shooting to Kill: The Ethics of Police and Military Use of Lethal Force (Oxford University Press, 2016), Institutional Corruption: A Study in Applied Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Dual Use Science and Technology, Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction (Springer, 2018).

The Ethics of Stress, Resilience, and Moral Injury Among Police and Military Personnel

According to leading psychiatrist Jonathan Shay whose patients are US war veterans, “Moral injury is an essential part of any combat trauma that leads to lifelong psychological injury. Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear and grief so long as ”what’s right” has also not been violated”. The focus of this paper is on moral injury in both military combatants and police officers. The role of combatants and that of police officer both necessarily involve the use of harmful methods – paradigmatically, the use of lethal force in the case of combatants, the use of coercive force, deception and the like in the case of police officers - in the service of good ends, notably national self-defence and law enforcement, respectively. However, the use of these methods sets up a dangerous moral dynamic, including so-called dirty hands/dirty harry scenarios, and the possibility of the erosion of moral character - and, in some cases, moral injury.

Affiliations: Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security & Cooperative Research Centre in Cybersecurity at Charles Sturt University (Canberra)
4TU Centre for Ethics and Technology at Delft University of Technology (The Hague)
Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics (University of Oxford)

Publications: Shooting to Kill: The Ethics of Police and Military Use of Lethal Force (Oxford University Press, 2016) Institutional Corruption: A Study in Applied Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2017)